Socialization: Crash Course Sociology #14 — Transcript

Full transcript

1. 0:00What do you, as you’re watching me right now, have in common with a toddler who’s being read a bedtime story?
2. 0:05I’ll give you a clue.
3. 0:06It’s also something you have in common with the kids in The Breakfast Club.
4. 0:09As well as with a soldier going through boot camp.
5. 0:11Give up?
6. 0:12You’re all being socialized.
7. 0:14It’s also the title of the episode.
8. 0:15You probably saw that.
9. 0:16Each of us is surrounded by people, and those people become a part of how we act and what we value.
10. 0:21This is known as socialization: the social process through which we develop our personalities and human potential and learn about our society and culture.
11. 0:28Last time, we talked about the HOW of socialization, how we learn about the social world.
12. 0:33And no matter which of the many theories out there that you like best, the answer seems to be that we’re socialized by interacting with other people.
13. 0:40But which people?
14. 0:41What we didn’t talk about last week was the WHO of socialization:
15. 0:44Who do we learn about the social world from?
16. 0:47What people, and what institutions, have made you who you are today?
17. 0:51[Theme Music]
18. 1:02Socialization is a life-long process, and it begins in our families.
19. 1:06Mom, Dad, grandparents, siblings – whoever you’re living with is pretty much your entire social world when you’re very young.
20. 1:12And that’s important, because your family is the source of what’s known as primary socialization –
21. 1:16your first experiences with language, values, beliefs, behaviors, and norms of your society.
22. 1:21Parents and guardians are your first teachers of everything –
23. 1:24from the small stuff like how to brush your teeth to the big stuff like sex, religion, the law, and politics.
24. 1:29The games they play with you, the books they read, the toys they buy for you, all provide you with what French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called cultural capital –
25. 1:37the non-financial assets that help people succeed in the world.
26. 1:40Some of this cultural capital may seem fairly innocuous – I mean, is reading Goodnight Moon really making that big of an impact on a toddler?
27. 1:47Yes, actually.
28. 1:48It teaches the “value” of reading as much as it helps the child begin to recognize written language.
29. 1:53The presence of books in the home is associated with children doing well in school.
30. 1:56Another important form of socialization that starts in the home is gender socialization,
31. 2:00learning the psychological and social traits associated with a person’s sex.
32. 2:03Gender socialization starts from the moment that parents decide on a gendered name and when nurses put a pink or a blue hat on the baby.
33. 2:09Other group memberships, like race and class, are important parts of initial socialization.
34. 2:13Race socialization is the process through which children learn the behaviors, values, and attitudes associated with racial groups.
35. 2:19Racial discrimination is partly the result of what parents teach their children about members of other races.
36. 2:24And class socialization teaches the norms, values, traits, and behaviors you develop based on the social class you’re in.
37. 2:30This may help explain why more middle- and upper-class children go to college.
38. 2:34Not only can the families afford to send them, but these children are expected to attend.
39. 2:38They grow up in a home that normalizes college attendance.
40. 2:40Now, gender, race, and class socialization are all examples of anticipatory socialization
41. 2:45– that’s the social process where people learn to take on the values and standards of groups that they plan to join .
42. 2:50Small children anticipate becoming adults, for example, and they learn to play the part by watching their parents.
43. 2:56Gender socialization teaches boys to “be a man” and girls to “be a woman”.
44. 2:59But children also learn through secondary socialization –
45. 3:02that’s the process through which children become socialized outside the home, within society at large.
46. 3:08This often starts with school.
47. 3:09Schools are often kids’ first introduction to things like bureaucracies,
48. 3:12as well as systems of rules that require them to be in certain places at certain times, or act in ways that may be different from what they learned at home.
49. 3:18Not only do schools teach us the three r’s – reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic –
50. 3:22but they come with what sociologists call a hidden curriculum – that is, an education in norms, values, and beliefs that are passed along through schooling.
51. 3:30Take, for example, a spelling bee.
52. 3:32Its main goal is to teach literacy and encourage kids to learn how to spell.
53. 3:36But something as seemingly benign as a spelling bee can have many hidden lessons that stick with kids, too.
54. 3:41For example, it teaches them that doing better than their peers is rewarding – and it enforces the idea that the world has winners and losers.
55. 3:48Another hidden curriculum of school in general is to expose kids to a variety of people.
56. 3:53When your only socialization is your family, you just get one perspective on race, class, religion, politics, et cetera.
57. 3:59But once you go out into the world, you meet many people from many backgrounds,
58. 4:03teaching you about race and ethnicity, social class, disability, gender and sexuality, and more.
59. 4:07School becomes not just a classroom for academic subjects, but also for learning about different kinds of people.
60. 4:12And, of course, schools are also where kids are exposed to one of the most defining aspects of school-age life: peer groups.
61. 4:18Peer groups are social groups whose members have interests, social position, and usually age in common.
62. 4:23As you get older, your peer group has a massive impact on the socialization process.
63. 4:27Let’s go to the Thought Bubble to to see just how big that impact can be.
64. 4:30In the late 1950s, American sociologist James Coleman began studying teenagers –
65. 4:35how they interacted and how their social lives affected their education.
66. 4:38He interviewed teens in 11 high schools in the Midwest, asking them questions about what social group they identified with and who else they considered members of their group.
67. 4:46Based on these interviews, Coleman identified four main social categories.
68. 4:49And, uh, the names of these categories will probably sound familiar to you:
69. 4:53They were nerds, jocks, leading crowd, and burnouts.
70. 4:56Basically, he discovered the 1950s version of The Breakfast Club.
71. 4:59And with these social categories came social prescriptions – behaviors that were expected of people in those groups.
72. 5:04Coleman found that certain things were important to the members of certain groups, like being a good dancer or smoking or having money or getting good grades.
73. 5:11He also tested the students’ IQs and assessed their grades.
74. 5:14And surprise!
75. 5:15It turned out that who you hung out with affected how well you did in school.
76. 5:18In some of the schools, getting good grades was considered an important criterion for the “leading group” – aka the popular kids– but in other schools, it wasn’t.
77. 5:25And in the schools where good grades were not a sign of popularity,
78. 5:28students who scored high on IQ tests actually did worse on their exams than similarly smart students at schools where good grades made you popular.
79. 5:35Thanks Thought Bubble!
80. 5:36Now, Coleman’s study might seem like common sense – of course you and your friends are gonna be pretty similar.
81. 5:41Don’t we choose to be friends with people who are like us?
82. 5:44Well, not entirely.
83. 5:45Coleman’s study showed that we don’t just pick peer groups that fit into our existing traits –
84. 5:50instead, peer groups help mold what traits we end up with.
85. 5:53OK, so far, we have family, schools, and peers as the main forces that influence someone’s socialization.
86. 5:58But what about me?
87. 6:00Yes, me, Nicole Sweeney.
88. 6:01Am I part of your socialization?
89. 6:04Or more precisely, are youtube videos considered a form of socialization?
90. 6:08Short answer: yes!
91. 6:09Long answer: The media you consume are absolutely a part of your socialization.
92. 6:13TV and the internet are huge parts of Americans’ lives.
93. 6:16And how we consume our media is affected by social traits, like class, race, and age.
94. 6:20A teenager or twenty-something in 2017 is much more likely to watch online media, like Netflix or youtube, than television.
95. 6:27And low-income Americans watch much more TV than their higher-income counterparts.
96. 6:31The media we consume also impact us dramatically.
97. 6:33The American Academy of Pediatrics, for example, has said there are connections between excessive
98. 6:37television viewing in early childhood and cognitive, language and social emotional delays.
99. 6:41But TV can also influence the attitudes of viewers, especially young ones.
100. 6:45For example, studies have found that kids exposed to Sesame Street in randomized-controlled trial settings, reported more positive attitudes toward people of different races –
101. 6:53most likely a result of the program’s wide variety of characters from different racial and ethnic backgrounds.
102. 6:58TV also affects us well beyond childhood.
103. 7:00One recent study found that MTV’s “16 and Pregnant” may have acted as a cautionary tale,
104. 7:04helping to change teen girls’ attitudes toward birth control and contributing to declining rates of teen pregnancy.
105. 7:10So far, the types of socialization we’ve talked about have been fairly subtle — but there are also more intense types of socialization.
106. 7:15Total institutions are places where people are completely cut off from the outside world, and face strict rules for how they must behave.
107. 7:22First coined by sociologist Erving Goffman, the term “total institution” refers to places like the military, prisons, boarding schools, or psychiatric institutions that control all aspects of their residents’ lives –
108. 7:32how they dress, how they speak, where they eat, where they sleep.
109. 7:35And in a total institution, residents undergo resocialization, where their environment is carefully controlled to encourage them to develop a new set of norms, values, or beliefs.
110. 7:44They do this by, basically, breaking down your existing identity and then using rewards and punishment to build up a whole new you.
111. 7:50Think about every boot camp movie you’ve ever seen.
112. 7:53All soldiers are given the same haircut and uniform, expected to reply to questions in the same way, put through the same grueling exercises, and humiliated by the same officer.
113. 8:00This process re-socializes the soldiers to put extreme value on their identity within the group, making them more willing to value self-sacrifice if their unit is in danger.
114. 8:09So whether you’re GI Jane training for a reconnaissance team or Molly Ringwald trying to maintain her queen-bee status in the leading crowd,
115. 8:15the you that you are has been powerfully shaped by people and institutions.
116. 8:19Now, think back on your own life – who has been the biggest influence on YOUR socialization?
117. 8:24Who do you think that you yourself have influenced?
118. 8:26Hard questions to answer, maybe, but definitely worthwhile – and hopefully a little easier now that you’ve learned how sociologists think about it.
119. 8:33Today, we learned about five different types of socialization.
120. 8:35We talked about anticipatory socialization from your family, like gender norms, that prepare children for entering society.
121. 8:40We discussed the “hidden curriculum” in schools.
122. 8:43We learned about peer groups through a look at James Coleman’s study of teenage social groups.
123. 8:46We explored the role of media in socialization.
124. 8:49And finally, we talked about total institutions and how they can act as a form of re-socialization.
125. 8:54Crash Course Sociology is filmed in the Dr. Cheryl C. Kinney Studio in Missoula, MT, and it’s made with the help of all of these nice people.
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